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    At the Corner of Past and Future
    A Collection of Life Stories

    Pamela Carter Joern (Author)

    9781496242785

    Paperback / softback, published 1 June 2025

    152 pages
    21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg

    “The Nebraska voice of Pamela Carter Joern shines like the stars in the vast dome of her natal sky, at once lyrical and straightforward. With sharp observation, tenderness, and wry humor, her collected stories and essays carry us irresistibly from a three-year-old’s memory of a red couch by a window to wise and surprising meditations on mortality in a wider world. It’s a wonder and a gift.”-Gayla Marty, author of Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm
    “Pamela Carter Joern delivers what I want from a well-crafted memoir in essays: emotional honesty, unstinting candor, lyrical writing, artful storytelling, attention to context, and a deep and fearless questioning of what she knows, or thinks she knows, about herself and her place in the world.”-Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries and The Nature of Home
    “Pamela Carter Joern shows us the big sky in this affective and eloquently written collection. The big sky of a Great Plains childhood. The big sky of flying leaps, finding meaning, and facing mortality. The big sky of Nebraska itself, a necessary landscape that pulls her home, holds her steady, and keeps letting her leave and return again. These heartrending essays about place, personhood, and the passage of time invite us to bask in all our big skies of troubled and ecstatic living.”-Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic and Apocalypse, Darling

    With keen observation and deep reflection, Pamela Carter Joern probes her life. No topic is too small or too sacred, from gutting chickens to GaudÍ’s cathedral. Through a range of experiences-growing up in rural Nebraska, raising children, surviving cancer, becoming a writer-she explores the tenuous link between memory and truth. Joern displays a gift for mining wisdom through surprising connections, juxtaposing her father’s life to the discoveries of Isaac Newton or the writer’s task to the ancient art of alchemy. She weds philosophical insight and spiritual imagination and laces this amalgam with candor and wit, resulting in a work that is engaging, intimate, and illuminating.

    Introduction

    Part 1. INTERSECTIONS of TIME and PLACE

    1. Looking for Direction

    2. Forest and Prairie

    3. At the Corner of Past and Future

    4. Standing in Lines

    5. Comforter

    6. Salvador DalÍ and Me

    Part 2: INTERSECTIONS of MEMORY and TRUTH

    7. My Earliest Memory

    8. Memory Thefts and Transplants

    9. In Pursuit of Magic

    10. Dr. Silverman and the Kansas City A’s

    11. My Mother, the Liar

    12. Vaccines

    13. Shards

    14. Sky

    Part 3: INTERSECTIONS of LIFE and ART

    15. Carnal Appetites

    16. Cathedrals and Cottonwoods

    17. Egg Carton Art

    18. God Is Not a tv Repairman

    19. Because the Poet Died

    20. Privilege

    21. I Say Unicorns Are Real

    22. Souls at White Heat

    23. Fatigue

    24. A Flying Leap

    25. What Is the Meaning of This?

    Acknowledgments

    Notes

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